Understanding immutable infrastructure

Merriam-Webster defines immutable as “not capable of or susceptible to change.” It may seem counterintuitive to apply that term to an IT infrastructure. Most people are familiar with mutable infrastructures.

A mutable infrastructure is tuned and tweaked, as changes are required. IT departments build immutable infrastructures to specific requirements without ever changing it.

If the original specifications need to change, the IT department develops a new infrastructure. The old infrastructure is obsolete and the new one replaces it entirely.

Virtualization is the key technology that makes an immutable infrastructure possible. It wouldn’t be cost effective to replace physical hardware every time a change is required. However, the virtualization of hardware and software for networking, servers, and storage creates a new world of opportunity.

Immutable infrastructure has many strategic advantages for medium- to enterprise-level companies.

Reduces support calls

Organizations that use immutable infrastructure receive a significantly lower number of support calls. When issues do arise, they’re finding it much easier to resolve those issues by deleting the instance causing the problems. It’s also possible for the engineering staff to quickly trace that failure back to a root cause and update the system to eliminate it.

Improves security incident resolution

One of the big challenges when responding to security incidents is the blurred line between a normal operation and an exception. An immutable infrastructure is very clear about the line between those two states.

As a result, exceptions are easier to identify and machine learning can replace manual rules to spotting them. With versioning occurring at the container level, that baseline is a reliable reference for normality. It’s possible to prevent some exceptions before they occur.

Takes advantage of whitelisting for security

Security personnel can take advantage of the immutable infrastructure and whitelisting. For example, if a particular application should never consume a specified amount of memory, whitelisting will enforce that rule. The whitelisting will help to thwart security breaches in real time, and the security team will be able to spot the attack.

Applications can be deployed securely using whitelisting. Tests conducted on an image will prove or disprove compliance. The new application can be deployed with security in place.

In the same way, whitelist configuration changes can be tested against the latest version of an application before deployment.

Eliminates configuration drift

Whenever you’re not sure that all your servers have the same configuration, supporting the servers becomes a time-consuming task. This usually happens when multiple instances of the server definition are running at once. All it takes is for someone to change a server configuration manually, and it can cause a lot of chaos.

Using an immutable infrastructure, there is only one instance of a server configuration running. And that instance was thoroughly checked before being deployed.

Eliminates synchronization tasks

When instances are updated while they’re running, problems with security and configuration drift can pop up. The typical answer to that problem is continuous synchronization.

In continuous synchronization, scripts run regularly to update configuration changes that have been made since the last update. Unfortunately, this process will sometimes temporarily create misconfigured servers. From a security standpoint, the process may overwrite malware, but it’s not a sound security strategy.

An immutable infrastructure eliminates the need for synchronization.

Takes advantage of cloud capabilities

The cloud is already built to support immutable infrastructures. The ability to remove and create virtual machines on the fly is already part of the cloud environment. And they perform that function in a way that doesn’t disturb applications.

Further, the cloud systems will switch traffic between instances in a way that preserves an instance until all running transactions are completed.

Produces fast recoveries

When the DevOps team deploys a new instance, they also save the old instance. If a rollback is required, restoring the old instance is an easy and quick way to make the rollback happen. In addition, you know that the older version works.

Facilitates experimentation

Any tech team would enjoy having an easy and safe way to experiment. With immutable infrastructures, they can experiment safely. The rollback capability takes the fear out of experimentation and supports innovation.

Conclusion

Immutable infrastructures will undoubtedly become more common as more organizations move to the cloud. The advantages of better security and easier management are difficult to ignore.

In addition, you’ll be able to save a great deal of time. The resource drain caused by configuration drift and synchronization will be a thing of the past. Better security and fast recovery will become standard.

Your team will be free to experiment more than ever before, allowing them to come up with more innovative solutions to business problems.

In today’s cloud environment, a new mindset will allow your organization to move from older, time-consuming ways of managing servers and virtual machines to a contemporary approach that takes advantage of new technology and new thinking.

Step 1 of 10

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3

months

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Based on your answers, you’re in great shape to start your AWS journey. We’re happy to supplement your efforts. Our team of expert resources can help you with migration questions, modernization needs, and 24/7 management of your applications once you’re running in AWS.

Based on your answers, you’ve got a good foundation in place to start your AWS journey. The good news is, we can help! And you can save time and money by focusing your team on business issues while we handle the cloud work faster and cheaper than in-house resources.

Based on your answers, you’re on the right track, and we can help you start your AWS journey. You may feel like you have a lot of work to do, but we can help with migration planning and deployment. With EPLEXITY you can get up and running on AWS faster, easier, and more affordably then you may have realized.

Accelerated migration to the AWS cloud

Many Customers need to ensure that their cloud environments are compliant with regulations (such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, or PCI) before they could start migrating applications and infrastructure. CXOS Managed AWS ensures compliance with the proper regulations as part of automated CXOS AWS landing zone deployment and on-going compliance management.

Additionally, The CXOS Design Library of production grade AWS Architectures are 100% automated leading to a reduction of time and cost by 80% associated with migrations. This saves our customers between $600-$1,200 per server migrated in Professional Services one-time fees.

Resource cost avoidance

Eliminating the need to hire new cloud resources yields on average $625,000 annually in cost savings. Running the project in-house is the alternative to CXOS-led cloud migration and management. For our customers, this would have required hiring the equivalent of a 4 - 10 FTEs (4 for 8X5 service and support\migration coverage vs minimum of 10 for 24/7) who possess cloud expertise and then keeping them on staff to run cloud operations postmigration. Leveraging CXOS to prepare for the migration and to take over operations saves our customers hundreds of hours of expensive resource time.

Optimized Resource Efficiency Gains

CXOS Managed AWS brings operational excellence, experience, expertise, and best practices, aligned with AWS Well-architected Standards that allowed our customers to achieve higher resource efficiency gains, focusing resources on higher business impacting activities than what it would have achieved on its own.

Improved organizational security

The average cost of an SMB data breach is now $117,000 per incident, according to a study of data breach costs at small to medium sized businesses performed by Kaspersky Labs. Working with CXOS Managed AWS Services often-times provides a major overall security benefit to our customers and reduces the chance of a major security breach, which can cause damage in the form of brand reputation, stock price, and cost of remediation efforts.

Gartner expects that through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be due to the customer’s improper configurations. CXOS Managed AWS adheres to rigorous security engineering standards, aligned to AWS Well Architected Security Pillar and performs monitoring and remediating of security incidents 24/7/365.

Cloud infrastructure management tooling

Creating or buying your own infrastructure management tools such as patch, update, support ticketing, security, or backup solutions leads to increased infrastructure costs. CXOS provided all necessary management tools. Our customers on average save an additional $73,000 annually on cloud infrastructure management tooling. Working with CXOS Managed AWS Services enables customers to avoid fees they would have paid if they led cloud operations on their own.

Reduced downtime

ITIC’s latest 2019 Server Reliability Survey, which polled over 1,000 businesses worldwide from November 2018 through January 2019, found that a single hour of downtime now costs 98% of firms at least $100,000. With CXOS Managed AWS Services running cloud operations, customers see higher uptime for their AWS Workloads due to improved patching compliance, a reduction in the number of major security incidents, and faster incident response. Higher uptime can also result in incremental revenue that the customers would not have recognized if they ran cloud operations on their own.